Dead Aim

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “I didn’t shoot anyone. I don’t even own a gun, and I don’t know how to pick locks, and if I were going to frame someone, I’d find a better way to do it than that. Hoping you heard a shot and came in and got framed. That’s not a very good plan.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if I came in,” I said. “All that mattered was I was there, and the cops could fill in the rest of the blanks.”

  “Wouldn’t you have to have the same kind of gun that killed him?” Givens said. “Wouldn’t you have to have a gun that had been fired?”

  “Okay,” I said, “you’re starting to sound more convincing. Listen, let me put it another way. We really don’t know you had anything to do with it. We’re just fishing. But we don’t like being played for idiots. Some might think that happens daily, but they would be wrong. Leonard just looks foolish, he’s not.”

  “Thanks,” Leonard said. “That was mighty white of you.”

  Givens said, “Good day,” and made like a bullet for his car.

  I trailed after him. When he got to the car, unlocked it and was opening the door, I said, “Thing is, if you two have something going on that’s got nothing to do with us, maybe we can help. Maybe you ought to talk to us.”

  Givens looked back at me, paused. I thought for a minute he was going to say something, but instead he got in his car and drove away.

  “He hesitated,” Leonard said. “I think that help line got to him.”

  “I was just throwing it out there, seeing if it had a hook on it.”

  “I think it did,” Leonard said. “And some bait, and he almost went for it. That makes me think maybe he’s telling the truth. Or part of the truth. That they didn’t set us up. But it’s also got me thinking he knows more about what happened than he’s letting on.”

  “I keep telling myself if we’re out of it, we ought to let it go,” I said.

  “I know,” Leonard said. “But you know, that would be a first, and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. Next thing, I’ll break down and buy my own cookies. And you know that ain’t right.”

  ***

  We had just pulled away from the restaurant when my cell rang.

  It was Marvin. He said, “I got a call from Givens.”

  I had it on speaker, so Leonard heard it. “That was quick.”

  “So, does this mean we’re in trouble,” I said.

  “No,” Marvin said. “I think something you did may have worked out. He wants to see you at his office, downtown in an hour. It’s a pleasant request. He even said please and that he’s thought over what you said and he wants to talk straight.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “Find out how interesting.”

  We stopped by Starbucks and sat at a table and had coffee in mugs. Since I found out you can have it in a ceramic mug if you don’t plan on carrying it off, I had it that way every chance I got. It tastes better.

  We drank our coffee, and then went over to the law office and rode the elevator up to the third floor. When we got there the office door was open. Frank Givens and Sharon Devon were both there. Sharon was in a chair near the desk. She looked as if she had just seen her own ghost.

  Givens was standing up behind his desk. As we came in, he said, “Shut the door.”

  I shut it.

  “I started to say something in the restaurant lot,” Givens said, “but you see, part of the problem was who I had lunch with today. I wanted to get out of there as swiftly as possible. Before he came out. I didn’t have your number, so I called your boss.”

  “Sometime boss,” Leonard said. “Actually, he can’t do without us.”

  “So you weren’t there to eat?” I said.

  “I lied,” Givens said. “I went in and I sat in a back booth in a conference room and got talked to by a person who is part of the problem. Him and his bodyguard.”

  I looked at Leonard, said, “Is any of this making any sense?”

  “Not to me,” he said. “But I’m still trying to figure out the ending to the Sopranos.”

  “I’m sorry,” Givens said. “Please sit down.”

  There were two very comfortable leather chairs, and we sat in them.

  Sharon Devon had not spoken a word. She looked as if she had been crying. Her eyes were red as sunrise and she looked more her age today, as if she had finally lost the war against it. I felt sorry for her. I feel sorry for just about everybody.

  “We led you along some,” she said.

  “Figured that,” Leonard said.

  “Me and Henry,” Sharon said, “we weren’t really having trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “We were just pretending,” she said.

  I glanced at Givens. He didn’t look too happy. I couldn’t tell if it was about Henry and her not actually having trouble, or about something worse. I decided a little of column A and a little of column B. I had a suspicion there might even be a column C.

  “So we were just sort of window dressing?” Leonard said.

  She nodded. “Yes. You see, we have a daughter, Nora.”

  We knew that, of course, but we didn’t say so.

  “She is by Henry’s previous marriage. I was never able to have children. But, I love her quite a bit. Nora was precious to me. She wasn’t quite a teenager when we first met, but I took to her right away, and she to me. After that came the teenage years and Nora was pretty wild. Not that uncommon. I was pretty unruly myself. Nora started seeing boys we didn’t want her to see, and she started experimenting with drinking and drugs. It made what happened later easy.” She paused. Givens got up, went to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of water, got a glass and a coaster and brought it over to her. He placed the glass on the coaster and unscrewed the cap on the water bottle and poured about half a glass.

  Patiently, she waited while he did all this, as if a pause like this was the most natural thing in the world. For the two of them, maybe it was. When he was finished she sipped her water, delicately, placed the glass back on the coaster.

  “You see, Henry really was in oil,” she said. “And he really did have a loss of money. But part of the reason wasn’t just a shift in natural fortune. There was a dismantling of fortune, and Henry was the cause. He liked to gamble. He liked to gamble a lot. Then the business went bad and he got into debt with the wrong people. He bet on some football games, some horses. He bet on just about anything. He would have bet on the number of freckles on my ass if I’d have been willing to let someone count.

  “I loved him, but he was a gambling addict, and no matter how bad the people were he got into debt with, he kept letting the debt get deeper. Then they put interest on what he owed. Lots of interest. About double. They wanted him to get in deep, because they assumed he was a big shot, and that whatever problem he was having paying would go away, because they had had a few ups and downs with him before, and in the end, he had paid it off, and with interest. Lots of interest.”

  “But the downs didn’t stop,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. They didn’t. He went to them and told them there was no way he could pay all that back if they kept compounding the interest, which they were doing. They didn’t listen. He was late, so they added on a late fee, and added interest on that. He told them if they stopped compounding it, maybe he could pay it back, in time. He probably couldn’t have paid it back if they had let him go back in time to the beginnings of the earth and work it off up until now. The business, it wasn’t coming back. Not the way they thought it might. Fact was, he had lost the business, but they didn’t know that.”

  Sharon paused and drank some more of her water.

  “He let them think he was still making money. Maybe that was the right thing, to let them think that, because if they didn’t think he could pay, they didn’t have any reason to let him live. They even threatened me. We had some money. But it was just eating money, gas, enough to pay a few bills. We didn’t have enough to pay them so that it would mean anything to them. That’s when we
came up with a plan. Idea was we’d divorce and sell the house.”

  “I don’t see why you would have to divorce,” I said. “Don’t see the plan in that.”

  “Turns out it wasn’t too good a plan,” she said. “We tried to get clever because we thought we were smarter than a bunch of thugs.”

  “You probably are smarter,” I said, “but not as clever. They’re two different things.”

  “Or as ruthless,” Leonard said. “That’s something makes them real different.”

  “Why didn’t you just go to the cops?” I said.

  “For the same reason I said,” Sharon said. “We thought we were smarter. We didn’t want people to know about Henry’s gambling debts. We thought we could work things out and no one would know, and we could make some kind of life together again.”

  “So what was the plan?” Leonard said.

  Sharon drank more of the water and looked as if she might break out crying. She didn’t. She said, “Thing was, Henry thought if we were divorced, at least they’d leave me alone. They didn’t. And the man that I said I dated, that got beat up—”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He isn’t really your type.”

  “No,” she said. “He was a messenger for the people Henry owed.”

  “And Henry beat him up, causing more problems,” Leonard said.

  “Yes,” she said, “but there was already a problem. You see, the messenger came to my house because he said he wanted us to know that if we didn’t pay he had our daughter. She had been seeing someone that was part of the problem. Jackie Cox. She was in with the wolves already.”

  “Ah, I got it,” I said. “The Dixie Mafia Cox family.”

  “You know them?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I know who they are. They took the place of someone who used to run this area’s business. Those people we did know. They came to kind of a sad end.”

  “Rumor is,” said the lawyer, “you were involved.”

  “Rumors are all over the place,” I said.

  “Jimson and his crew,” the lawyer said, “they got killed in a filling station in No Enterprise, and the rumor is from cops I know, you and Leonard might have had something to do with that.”

  “We had our problems with Jimson,” I said. “But no. That wasn’t us.”

  And it wasn’t. It was a young and lethal lady named Vanilla Ride who had put them down, but that’s a different story.

  I said, “I don’t want you to be too disappointed about that, though. Me and Leonard, we’ve had our moments, and I figure you wouldn’t have asked us here if you didn’t know that, and didn’t want us to have a moment again.”

  “Jackie was seeing our daughter,” Sharon said. “She met him because of my husband and his gambling dealings. He didn’t intentionally introduce her to Jackie, but he used to have these tough guys coming around, and Jackie, he’s the son of one of them.”

  “Richard Cox,” I said.

  She nodded her head. “They got tight quick. Maybe because he was a bad boy, and Nora liked bad boys. But then Henry owed them the money, things went bad, and then they sent this Unslerod around.”

  “He was kind of a tough guy they used,” Givens said.

  I didn’t mention that he wasn’t that tough anymore, and unless Marvin got in touch with his cop friend, Unslerod and his girlfriend were still collecting flies in a trailer out in the boonies.

  “He said they had our daughter,” Sharon said, “and if Henry didn’t find some way to pay half, soon, and the other half almost as soon, they would harm her. Henry was already living apart from me, trying to set the divorce up to maybe make me safer, and then this guy came around. He was looking to talk to Henry. He thought he was tough.”

  “But Henry was tougher,” I said.

  “Much more so,” she said. “He gave him a beating and they didn’t get any money. It was a foolish thing to do, them having our daughter. I don’t think Henry believed them at first. Then they sent this.”

  She opened her purse and took out a plastic bag and dug in the bag. When she got through with that she pulled out another plastic bag and unwrapped that. There was a pair of red thong underwear inside.

  “These are hers,” she said. “I bought them for her and her father didn’t like that I did. All the girls were wearing them, she said, and I thought it was harmless. Anyway, they’re hers. I know they are. It proves to me they have her.”

  “What we would like,” Givens said, “is that you go and get her back. That you make these men stop bothering Sharon. They killed her husband and took her daughter, and now they’re pressuring her to pay. She can’t pay. They have come through me with all this. They said Sharon goes to the cops, or doesn’t pay something on what she owes, and by something they mean a substantial amount, they will send the part of her daughter that fits in the underwear to her in a cardboard box with a bow on it.”

  “How much time did they give you?” Leonard asked.

  “Three days,” Givens said, without waiting for her to answer.

  ***

  At Marvin’s office, he said, “So, how do you read it?”

  “I think Henry got his dick in a crack,” I said, “and he was too arrogant to take care of matters when he could, so he just kept it there and the crack got tighter. He didn’t pay, so they took his daughter. They sent around a guy they thought was tough to collect and tell Henry how things were, that being Unslerod, and maybe he thought he’d play tough on Henry. Henry was tougher. Maybe Unslerod pissed Cox off with his failure, or maybe it was some other reason, but it seems more than likely Cox had him taken care of. His girlfriend was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Later on it was Henry’s turn. I figure Unslerod and the woman were dead some days before Henry, considering how their bodies looked. Way I understand it, Cox doesn’t like failure, and he gives it a very short shelf life.”

  “Question comes to me,” Marvin said, “guy owes you, why whack him if you want the money that bad?”

  “That’s the question me and Hap got to thinking on coming over here,” Leonard said. “We got to thinking on it hard enough that I cell phoned Sharon. I asked her how they expected her to pay what was owed, and she said—”

  “Insurance money,” Marvin said, and snapped his fingers at the same time.

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “You are a wizard. She has a shit-full policy. Seven hundred thousand. Henry managed to keep that up, as protection for Sharon. That isn’t even all Henry owes, but it’s a good part of it. She told me that, I cleverly asked, doesn’t it take time for the policy to pay out? And she said it did, and you know what?”

  “The lawyer is helping her out,” Marvin said, leaned back in his desk chair and placed his hands behind his head. “He’s going to put the money up for her in return for the insurance money.”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “He’s not only an ex-husband carrying a torch, he’s a fucking saint.”

  “Sure he is,” Marvin said. “Sure he is.”

  ***

  We drove over in my car and met the lawyer. We were going to go with him to the Dixie Mafia guy and they were going to give us the girl in exchange for the lawyer’s money. When the insurance paid off, Givens was going to get his money back from Sharon. He was carrying a briefcase when he came outside his office and met us at the curb.

  It was a nice day, and I wondered, as I often wondered, if it might be my last day on earth; if this might be the day I set out to do something simple and it turned bad and I’d end up in a ditch with crows pecking at my eyes.

  Givens climbed in the back seat with his briefcase. He said, “We got to drive to Tyler.”

  “All right,” I said, and I slipped away from the curb. “We meeting in the city?”

  “That’s the plan,” he said. “It should go easy enough.”

  “They explained it to you?” Leonard said. “You got all the particulars down?”

  “They just want the money,” Givens said.

  “What about the
boyfriend?” I said. “Cox’s son?”

  “He was just the bait,” Given said. “He was the one that got her to trust him.”

  “And that’s kind of what we are, aren’t we?” I said.

  Givens was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “I might have to throw a few words in, but I figure you’ll put it together pretty quick. I’m talking about you getting us to trust you, same as you say Jackie did with Nora.”

  Givens didn’t say anything. I looked at his face in the rearview mirror. He was doing a fair job of looking puzzled.

  “Let me see the briefcase,” Leonard said.

  “Why?” Givens said. He put a hand on top of it where it rested on the seat.

  “Because if you don’t,” Leonard said, “I’m going to have Hap pull over by the side of the road and I’m going to kick your ass so hard you’ll be peeking out of your asshole.”

  “What in the hell is wrong with you guys?” he said.

  “Let’s just say we don’t like your story,” I said, “We look in the suitcase, see the money there, we might believe you better.”

  “It’s there,” he said.

  “Show it to us,” Leonard said. “And right now. I’m feeling edgy.”

  “He wanted vanilla cookies,” I said, “but he got up too late, and I had eaten all of them with my coffee. You don’t want to make him mad when he hasn’t had his cookies.”

  Givens had no idea what his life had to do with vanilla cookies, and frankly, neither did I, but it was on my mind. Cookies are not cheap, I’ll have you know. Not when your brother eats them by the bagful. What really made me mad was Leonard didn’t gain a pound. I looked at cookies too long and I could feel myself gaining weight.

  Leonard leaned over the seat and held out his hand, said, “And that gun you got under your coat. I saw it when you got in the car. Reach for it and I’ll be over this seat pronto and stick it up your nose.”

  “I just brought it for safety,” he said.

  “But you told us they said not to bring guns,” I said. “They making like a special deal just for you?”